hydrogen-web

Lightweight matrix client with legacy and mobile browser support

Web Development Mobile & Desktop

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5Distinct people

12Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

711GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Lightweight matrix client with legacy and mobile browser support

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 7:02:26 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-08-22 09:03:42 UTC to 2023-09-22 20:22:45 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	4	4
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	5
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2

What Hacker News says

4 sources

Arathorn·Dec 18, 2020

Cerulean doesn't have E2EE yet because it deliberately doesn't use a Matrix SDK but just talks simple raw Matrix directly via HTTPS. However, it'd be easy to swap out for a real SDK like the one in https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web to get E2EE (or pipe it via pantalaimon :)

In Cerulean: Experimental micro-blogging app for Matrix

Arathorn·Dec 7, 2020

https://matrix.org/blog/2020/09/15/gsoc-report-html-embeddab... was a GSOC project this year which heads in that direction. Meanwhile Hydrogen has been built to be embeddable (https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web). And Gitter of course has http://sidecar.gitter.im/. But nobody has fully packaged one up as FOSS Disqus/Intercom/etc alt yet. It's a huge and easily-fillable gap in the Matrix ecosystem :)

In Gitter now speaks Matrix

vanburen·Oct 28, 2020

The hydrogen client for matrix.org (1) has an interesting approach using vanilla JavaScript and indexeddb. From a previous this week in matrix(2): "Hydrogen tries to be the lightest Element. It is written entirely in vanilla javascript (no React, no Webpack) for complete control, structured as an MVVM app, leveraging the raw performance of indexeddb." (1) https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web (2)https://matrix.org/blog/2020/08/14/this-week-in-matrix-2020-...

In If Not SPAs, What?

Arathorn·Aug 22, 2020

Beyond the general idea of Matrix itself, a nice snapshot of all the stuff currently happening in the Matrix ecosystem right now is the This Week In Matrix blog series, which goes out every Friday. This week’s one is at: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/08/21/this-week-in-matrix-2020-... Some of the stuff I’m personally most excited about right now is Hydrogen (https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web): a super lightweight web client which heavily leans on indexeddb for storage and so minimises RAM. My primary account has 3000 rooms and about 450K visible users - on element-web this uses 1.1GB of RAM, but on hydrogen it uses 14MB :) We’re also looking at glueing E2EE into Hydrogen via the crypto layer of matrix-rust-sdk, which could be a massive win in terms of reusing and auditing a robust safe implementation for the Hard problem of encryp

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tion, rather than implementing it from scratch every time in every new client. Dendrite (go server impl) progress is also very promising - we’ve been focusing on it (at last!) since the beginning of the year, and going to enter beta in the next few weeks. A typical small/medium live server is currently using 57MB of RAM (rather than synapse’s ~500MB). We haven’t started optimising yet :) Synapse has also finally come of age - the whole codebase has almost been switched to twisted/asyncio rather than twisted deferreds, which both speeds things up a bit but also gives us way better visibility on profiling for future perf work. Almost all bits now scale horizontally (apart from the master dispatcher process). Synapse isn’t going away - we see Synapse and Dendrite coexisting much as Apache and nginx coexist today. Conduit is also super exciting as an entirely community developed Rust homeserver, which currently runs ~10x faster than either Synapse or Dendrite (but doesn’t federate yet, or scale horizontally). It’s really fun to see an indie FOSS server implementation properly take off :) Finally, P2P Matrix is coming together well - compiling Dendrite to WASM and running it clientside, using Yggdrasil currently as an overlay network to tunnel through to other P2P nodes. In short: the Matrix ecosystem is in a fairly healthy place right now - the next gen of clients and servers should be incredible :)

In Matrix – An open network for secure, decentralized communication